Smoothing groups issue after rigging
polycounter lvl 3
So I hired someone on fiver to rig one of my character and I didn't saw it at first but all my smoothing groups are GONE, all the edges are hard !
I tried to transfer the vertex normals through transfer attribute(and unlocking the normals of the target mesh) but the results is just weird and when I try to render it every edges are still rendered hard.
It is a pretty complex model with a LOT of hard surface parts that took me days to get the proper smoothing group for it, so no way I restart that.. Better throw out the rig
Replies
what software ?
Well first of all the "rig" is not the issue, since a rig is the special set of controls and solvers that allows you to control your character using IK, lookat constraints, and so on - and this doesn't affect a model in terms of mesh data or normals. The thing that affected your model is the skin weighting pass ; or rather, the fact that your model went through many conversions between your carefully crafted scene and the work environment of your animator/tech artist.
• So, the first thing to do is to check if you can setup a pipeline that involves ZERO file conversion at all. That is to say avoiding any FBX exports/imports and only relying on Maya/Blender/Max native files.
That's obviously not always possible, so from there you have two options :
• Looking in full detail at all your export settings, and all the import settings of the animator. This may take hours of back and forth depending on your willingness to get into that, and the relationship with the person you've hired. Between two people who go along well this can take about an hour. Over email with a freelancer, this can take days and never get anywhere.
• Lastly (or rather, firstly, as this is definitely the one technical aspect that you need to master first and foremost), you need to look into the transfer options of your modeling app. Not so much to transfer the smoothing groups information, but rather, to transfer the skin weights of the skinweighted model onto your clean original.
This is why it is important to be precise with words ("skin weights" rather than "rig"). Because the search terms you'll need are : "How to transfer skin weights in [name of the program]".
And also, this is why it is important to figure the whole tech stack before spending hours refining a model, as opposed to only worrying about these things as the show up, potentially ruining a project.
Ok so the problem wasn't actually a problem because the animator just forgot to turn on export smoothing groups when exporting as an fbx.
And don't worry I created the smoothing groups in Maya and chose an animator that was using Maya so everything would remain as it was. But when I simply tried to transfer the smoothing groups throu the uv using the transfer attribute fonction as I said in the OP, it didn't worked at all, so I am glad I am not in this situation.
Maya
You just found one of the reasons why some of the biggest game productions in the world do not use smoothing groups :)
Really ? What do they use then ? How do they deal with normal baking artifacts ? They only rely on beveling the problematic edges ?
yes pretty much, it always comes at the price of more geo.
many huge projects work without. rigging is not the only reason, there are many more reasons. i personally do not agree to them but i also understand why a production that pushes out hundreds or thousands of assets on monthly basis wants to get rid of this source of error.